I have sometimes relished the large discourse of professors and other
very wise men.

I have not much to say of the road which we were travelling for the
second time. Reaching Middletown, my first call was on the wounded
Colonel and his lady. She gave me a most touching account of all the
suffering he had gone through with his shattered limb before he succeeded
in finding a shelter; showing the terrible want of proper means of
transportation of the wounded after the battle. It occurred to me, while
at this house, that I was more or less famished, and for the first time
in my life I begged for a meal, which the kind family with whom the
Colonel was staying most graciously furnished me.

After tea, there came in a stout army surgeon, a Highlander by birth,
educated in Edinburgh, with whom I had pleasant, not unstimulating talk.
He had been brought very close to that immane and nefandous
Burke-and-Hare business which made the blood of civilization run cold in
the year 1828, and told me, in a very calm way, with an occasional pinch
from the mull, to refresh his memory, some of the details of those
frightful murders, never rivalled in horror until the wretch Dumollard,
who kept a private cemetery for his victims, was dragged into the light
of day. He had a good deal to say, too, about the Royal College of
Surgeons in Edinburgh, and the famous preparations, mercurial and the
rest, which I remember well having seen there,--the "sudabit multum."
and others,--also of our New York Professor Carnochan's handiwork, a
specimen of which I once admired at the New York College. But the doctor
was not in a happy frame of mind, and seemed willing to forget the
present in the past: things went wrong, somehow, and the time was out of
joint with him.